


The World Smelled of Roses

by Realmer06



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Father's Day tag, Gen, Tardisficathon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-25
Updated: 2013-05-25
Packaged: 2017-12-12 22:37:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,615
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/816859
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Realmer06/pseuds/Realmer06
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the events of Father's Day, Rose retreats to the TARDIS's rose garden. The Doctor tracks her down there. </p><p>Written for the Tumblr tardisficathon.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The World Smelled of Roses

**Author's Note:**

> This is my submission for the Tardis Ficathon. My room, from claravoyant, was the Garden Room, citing that fandom often gives the TARDIS a rose garden. And I wondered why that might be.
> 
> AN1: This is my first time writing for Doctor Who, and I think it only fair to warn you all that I write angst. It doesn’t matter what I try to write, angst is what comes out. So of course, I tackled Doctor Nine. I hope I’ve done him justice.
> 
> AN2: I am pretty much a novice when it comes to Classic Who, but I didn’t want to not reference it at all, so I put in a couple references but kept it deliberately simple and vague. But if I got anything wrong, please tell me!

_The World Smelled of Roses_

_  
_She took his hand when he offered it, and she went willingly into the TARDIS, but he could tell she was reeling from what had just happened, and the moment they were across the threshold and the door was shut behind them, she dropped his hand and made a beeline for the corridor beyond the console room, not once looking back.  
  
He let her go. She was upset and she was feeling guilty and she was probably blaming herself for everything that had happened, and in a moment, yes, he would follow her, but just then, well, he’d only blinked back into existence a few minutes ago, and he was still trying to get his bearings.  
  
There was also a part of him that was still angry with her. It wasn’t a very large part, and it wasn’t nearly as angry (and hurt and betrayed) as it had been when he’d thought she’d done this on purpose, used him to save her father, but it was still there, reminding him that her actions, deliberate or not, had gotten him (and his TARDIS) erased from all of time and space, and that hadn’t been the most comfortable of experiences.  
  
He walked slowly through the console room, running his hands along the worn, familiar surfaces. “You all right?” he asked in a soft murmur, gentler than most would expect to hear from him. “Non-existence didn’t cause you any lasting damage, did it?” The console under his hands warmed a bit, humming pleasantly, and the Doctor smiled. “Naw, it’ll take more than Reapers to keep you down.”  
  
He took comfort from the feel of his ship, from the gentle pulse of energy surrounding him, in the air, under his feet, under his hands. It reassured him and calmed him as nothing else in the whole universe could. He traveled through all of time and space, seeing all the wonders that ever had been or ever would be, but the TARDIS was truly his home. The last two relics of Gallifrey, flying together through the universe.  
  
A blinking light on the console caught his attention and shook him from his surprisingly sentimental musings. With a frown, he pushed a button, pulled a lever, but there didn’t seem to be any problems that he could detect. He pulled the viewscreen toward him and was rewarded with the image of the door to Rose’s room. His concern that something was wrong with his TARDIS evaporated.  
  
“Not yet, thank you,” he said with an attempt at cheerfulness, but the only reply he received was a slight shift in the pitch of the hum surrounding him — nearly imperceptible, but he had been with this ship long enough to know the meaning. “Not sure I’m the face she wants to see right now,” he tried, dropping the cheer, but ignoring the twinge of guilt stemming from the knowledge that the TARDIS was probably right.   
  
The area of the console nearest his hand grew warm again, but not in a way that was welcoming. Rather, the Doctor got the distinct impression he was being scolded. He ignored it, choosing instead to lay in a course for a quiet area of space where they could just float around for a while and hopefully manage to stay out of trouble for two seconds together.   
  
The TARDIS complied and dematerialized, but the moment they were in flight, the ship shuddered and pitched, sending the Doctor stumbling toward the door that led beyond the console room. “All right, all right,” he said, straightening himself with great dignity. “There’s no need to be short with me.” And he set off to find his companion.  
  
It was strange, he mused as he headed for Rose’s room. He had never had a companion on board who awoke quite the same attitude from the TARDIS. Susan had come the closest, his dear granddaughter Susan, but she had been a Time Lord like him, able to feel the TARDIS the same way that he did. Rose, on the other hand, was human, decidedly, determinedly human, if today’s events were any indication.  
  
He hesitated outside her door. The last time he’d visited her room, it had just been one of any number of bedrooms available down this hallway, but over time, the TARDIS had made it more and more Rose’s, and the Doctor hadn’t been in it since it truly became hers. This was her space, nestled within his like an oasis in a desert, and he didn’t want to intrude (he was also stalling).   
  
But the TARDIS had made herself pretty clear, so the Doctor steeled himself and knocked, just to the right of Rose’s name burnished in Gallifrean on the door. “Rose?” he called when he got no response. “Are you in there?”  
  
He was met again with silence. Frowning, he turned the handle and cracked the door ever so slightly. “Rose?” he asked again, very aware that there were any number of things she might be doing behind this door that she wouldn’t want him to be privy to (though he was going to choose not to dwell on those possibilities at the moment) — but he needn’t have worried. It became clear very soon that Rose was not in her room.  
  
“Where the blazes has she got off to now?” he muttered under his breath, and as he turned, he saw a corridor branching off at the end of the hall that he was pretty sure hadn’t been there when he’d knocked on Rose’s door. He approached it warily, not because he distrusted his TARDIS at all, but because she wasn’t usually so overt about opening up new rooms and wings and whatnot.   
  
He followed the corridor until it dead-ended in a stone archway with a small brass plaque that read ‘Rose Garden’ in Gallifrean. The Doctor stopped and crossed his arms. “Rose garden?” he said in confusion, frowning. “Since when do we have a rose garden?” If he wanted roses, he could go to Artolit Prime or the third moon of Gridault or, in a pinch, Portland, Oregon right there on Earth. But he’d never needed to have a garden of the things in the middle of his TARDIS.  
  
Shaking his head, he crossed through the archway, confident that he’d find Rose somewhere within, or why else would the TARDIS have brought him here? Sure enough, around the first corner, he caught a glimpse of telltale blonde. “I hope you appreciate how unprecedented this is,” he called by way of announcing his presence. “The TARDIS doesn’t create new and _superfluous_ ” — he stressed the word toward the sentience he knew was listening — “rooms for just anybody.”  
  
“I didn’t ask it to,” Rose said, sounding small and young and defensive, and the Doctor realized too late that his words could have sounded like an accusation. “I just went exploring one day and it was here.”  
  
“I wasn’t suggesting you were manipulating the TARDIS, Rose,” the Doctor said gently. “I was just commenting on my ship’s uncharacteristic behavior.”  
  
He thought about sitting beside her as the silence between them stretched uncomfortably on. He thought about it, but the bench wasn’t that big, and he didn’t know if Rose wanted him that close, and it was much easier to pretend to be absorbed in the roses if he remained standing. So, he stood by a spray of climbing roses, and Rose refused to look at him, and he searched for the right thing to say. He _hated_ apologizing, and as he rarely made a habit of it, he was severely out of practice.   
  
“So, how long until we get back to London?” Rose asked in a tone he couldn’t quite place, still refusing to look at him.   
  
“What, do you want to go back to London?” he asked, uncertain what she meant.  
  
“Doesn’t much matter what I want, does it?” she said then, and he was pretty sure the tone was best labeled as ‘shamefully resigned’ or ‘braced but miserable,’ but neither of those labels was helping him understand what she was getting at. “Because you only take the best, and I’m pretty sure the best don’t almost destroy the universe, so what? You’re gonna drop me back at Mum’s, probably in the middle of the kitchen, and take off and that’s that. I never see you again.”  
  
The panicked emotions these words awoke in him was really quite embarrassing. He was 900 years old, and he’d lost and left countless companions in the time he’d been flying the stars, so the idea of doing that once more really shouldn’t have overwhelmed him with blind fear and the urge to Superglue her to the bench so she could never, ever leave him. It was like he was 200 again, but there was something about that incredibly young human girl, and there had been something about her from the moment he shared an elevator with her and a dismembered plastic shop dummy arm.   
  
“I’m not taking you home,” was all he trusted himself to say, and even that came out much rougher than he intended, like a growl or a bark and not at all what he was aiming for. “And you didn’t almost destroy the universe, you just almost unraveled your tiny corner of it. The universe itself would have been largely unaffected, so don’t go exaggerating your importance.”  
  
The words coming out of his mouth were conveying the opposite of what he actually wanted to say, to express, but they seemed, frustratingly, to be the only words he was capable of. Was he really so incapable of apologizing? Even the “I’m sorry,” he’d said in the church had come across as slightly mocking and condescending, as if the words were beneath him, even though they had been sincere.  
  
And yet, for all that he was inwardly berating himself, his words seemed to have an unexpected benefit. He saw Rose’s jaw clench and a fire light up in her eyes, and that was good, because it meant that the pale, folded-in version of Rose he’d found in this garden was being replaced with the fiery, stubborn nineteen-year-old who didn’t shy away from going head to head with him.   
  
“Anyway,” he said, trying to lose the gruffness, trying to sound softer and gentler, and only partly succeeding, “it wasn’t your fault, so stop blaming yourself, would you?”  
  
“Why?” she demanded then and he looked to her in some confusion. “Why do I get a pass?” she clarified. “Adam didn’t. Van Staaten didn’t. You made them take responsibility for what they’d done; why not me?”  
  
“Van Staaten was a criminal, Adam was a self-serving idiot, and you, Rose, are neither. Trust me, I will always make you take responsibility for your actions; but in this instance, you have. What happened was _not your fault_.”  
  
“I took us there,” Rose insisted stubbornly.  
  
“No,” the Doctor replied flatly in a voice that brooked no argument, though he had a feeling Rose would continue to try and make one, “ _I_ took us there. My time ship, my decision. _I_ took us there, Rose. _Me_.”  
  
“I asked you to,” was her return, and her chin was set in defiance, a posture he usually loved so well because it meant she was standing up for herself and standing strong, but in this instance, he wasn’t so enamored of it.   
  
“Yeah,” he said heatedly, his patience getting away from him, “and I said yes. _I_ took you there, Rose, to a place you had no business being. A nineteen-year-old girl defined by compassion who has never known her father, being asked to stand by and watch him die and do nothing? You should never have been put in that position, and you _certainly_ shouldn’t have been put in that position _twice_ , and that’s on me. So you can fuss and moan,” he said, having to talk suddenly louder to speak over her attempt to interrupt, “and argue all you like that it was still your actions that did the damage, and maybe it was. Because who’s really to blame: the babe who destroys a priceless manuscript by chewing on the pages, or the parent who gave it to him in the first place and expected him to read it?”  
  
He waited for a double heartbeat, but she didn’t try to interrupt again; she just sat, focus turned inward, considering what he’d said. Then she frowned. “Hang on,” she said, looking up at him, “did you just compare me to a teething infant?”  
  
“Oh, sure. _That’s_ what you take away,” he muttered. “Look, Rose, the point I was trying to make — ”  
  
“By comparing me to a teething infant,” she broke in. He ignored her.  
  
“Is that my job is to know when we’re walking into danger and to do everything I can to avoid it. I failed today, and I’m sorry for that. I’m sorry that I put you in a position where your actions caused disaster. Since you’re determined to feel responsible, I’ll give you that part of it, but lay the rest of the blame where it belongs — on my shoulders.”  
  
Rose looked down at her hands. “I said some really awful things to you today,” she said in a small voice. “Hurtful things.”   
  
“So did I,” he said simply.   
  
“Can — can you forgive me for them?” she asked then, and he didn’t think he would ever fully understand how this one young human girl could evoke _so much_ emotion. He went to her, sat beside her, and reached for her face, to turn it to his.  
  
“Oh, Rose,” he said in a voice barely more than a whisper. “I already have.”  
  
He held her face gently in his hand, as he had done once already that day, but here in this strange garden, surrounded by roses and their heady perfume, the gesture seemed to take on new significance, and he wondered briefly if the atmosphere in this room of the TARDIS was different than in other rooms, because he seemed suddenly breathless, and for one long moment, they were frozen there like that, and then Rose smiled — not her tongue in the teeth smile, but her softer, understanding smile — and embraced him.  
  
He held her close, this so very human girl who had worked her way into his life, and he almost dared to kiss her hair – almost.   
  
“Why’d she make you a rose garden?” he murmured instead, looking around at the flowers that surrounded them. He felt Rose shrug.  
  
“Dunno,” she said. “Only, it looks like the garden in this book my mum has. I used to sneak it under the kitchen table and look through the pictures. And I was thinking about that room early on, a few weeks ago, and I was a little homesick, and that’s when I found this place. Why, Doctor?” she said, shifting to look up at him. “What’s it mean?”  
  
“Means the TARDIS likes you,” he said simply, though in truth it was anything but simple. Rose and the TARDIS felt _connected_ somehow, when he opened his mind to look that far ahead. He couldn’t see when or how, and he didn’t want to, but the connection was there, ringing back through the timelines, and this room, special-made from Rose’s childhood memories, was just one indication of it. The TARDIS _liked_ Rose, and it seemed committed to making sure she stayed around for a while.   
  
And since that was right in keeping with what the Doctor wanted, for the time being, he decided not to question it too deeply.   
  
“C’mon,” he said, lacing his fingers through Rose’s and tugging her to her feet. “Plenty still left to explore.”

**Author's Note:**

> Please review!


End file.
